Use Your Mac To Collect Money By The Hour.

I like to use my Mac to collect money. There are times when working by the hour is a good thing.

To track my time I use my Mac. To collect money for my time I use OfficeTime. Elegance. Simplicity. All the right features. Just click to record your time. Click to invoice for your time.

I’ve used OfficeTime for a couple of years to track my time and create my invoices for clients. OfficeTime is something of an anomaly for invoicing software. It’s actually enjoyable to use, not difficult to master, and clicking to make money is fun.

Tracking your time and billing is easier than you think. OfficeTime gives you a timer. Click it, and it starts tracking your time for whatever you’re doing at the moment that requires tracking. Talking to a client. Struggling through a meeting. Working on a project.

Start off by setting up your basic Preferences. Just fill in the blanks. Name. How much to bill per hour. Add clients. Add projects. Even assign a different hourly rate to different projects or clients.

Then, click the timer and select a specific project when you start. Click it again when you’re done. OfficeTime tracks the time and assigns it to the correct project or client.

That’s the easy part. Then it gets easier. All that tracking gets stuffed into a database which OfficeTime uses to create reports and invoices. Each tracking event can be modified for time, billing time, start, stop, rate, and more.

Reports are one click. You’ll see where the time went for whatever day or period, and how much will be billed, or, in the case of tracking non-billing hours, how much money is disappearing.

Reports cover all the hours and minutes of a project for specific reporting periods, who’s been billed and who hasn’t, even reporting on all the time spent on personal tasks. Just click the timer and OfficeTime tracks it and assigns it accordingly.

Did I mention that reports are boring? It’s data. Visually sifting through data isn’t much fun, so OfficeTime has snappy charts and graphs so you can get a quick picture of what happened to your billing time without digging through data-centric reports.

That attention to detail, and understanding the need for eye candy for those of us with a taste for money but a distaste for tracking it, means OfficeTime is a good Mac citizen. It plays well with iCal and lets you lay out your entire day on screen so you can see where your time went.

Features? OfficeTime is loaded with features, but they’re not overwhelming.

Even better, when you make an appointment or block of time in iCal it gets integrated into the specific project in OfficeTime. If you know how to use iCal you’re half way to knowing OfficeTime. The other half is just clicking that timer and clicking on reports.

Time billing is often a laborious chore, but OfficeTime reduces it to something you truly want-- point and click. Email or mail. Sit back and collect money. OfficeTime provides templates for invoices. Simply insert your business name, phone number, address and other pertinent information, and OfficeTime generates the invoices.

The invoice can be ultra detailed or limited to totals, either way, your Mac stores all the information so even minute-by-minute tracking can be printed out with a click.

How about double dipping? OfficeTime’s timer is so good, you can actually track the time on multiple projects or clients at the same time. It’s the ultimate way to multi-task.

Many of us are not an army of one. OfficeTime is a team player and lets you combine multiple employee data files to create extensive reports by project, category, or client.

The OfficeTime download works for free for 21 days so there’s no excuse for not trying it out. It also comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. That means the developer is confident of what OfficeTime will do for you after the 21 day trial.

I’ve spent far more than $40 on computer invoicing applications that eventually scared me back to a shoebox for expense receipts and a stack of 3 x 5 cards to capture my time. No more. OfficeTime is a sweet, highly Mac-like application that makes tracking time and collecting money fun.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.